


How are we today, Darth Vader?

by Excavatrice



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Fear, Gen, Hatred, Medical Trauma, Pain, Regret, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-20
Updated: 2015-08-20
Packaged: 2018-04-16 08:25:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4618407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Excavatrice/pseuds/Excavatrice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darth Vader sterilizes his mask and feels something in the Force.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How are we today, Darth Vader?

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Godmorgen, hvordan har De det, Darth Vader?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3619473) by [Excavatrice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Excavatrice/pseuds/Excavatrice). 



> Tweaked a little bit by BerlinKabarett - thanks!  
> Inspired by the Great Polio Epidemic 1951-52.

How are we today, Darth Vader?

Yes, how is he?  
He wakes up because his mask stops infusing the sleeping gas. His face tightens, and where the tubes connect through the residues of his burned skin, it is always uncomfortable. The pain is everywhere. In the burned hand, but also in the missing hand, and the legs that are no longer there.  
He scratches the leg imitation with his prosthetic hand, it helps a bit. The good thing about the pain is that it allows him to forget what he has dreamt. Almost.

He sits up, making the mask wheeze more. The remains of his lungs get bursts of pure oxygen while he moves or just thinks of moving. Exposed muscle and bones gets moistened with a special gel to prevent drying under his body armor.  
His doctors say, that if he had a living relative, they would be able to harvest new cells to grow enough skin and graft onto his torso-body and his face. What is left of his own skin is too damaged.

Does he miss having a face?  
The mask gives him an un-natural appearance, like an unborn mechanoid. Wherever he shows up, the humans shrink. Other species are not likewise psychologically affected. His frightened staff has stopped offering him a mirror, while the mask needs cleaning inside.

He loosens the threads in the sides of the mask himself, still being a self-reliant Jedi, with great mechanical and spiritual skills, his blood filled with Midi Clorians. The assistant is ready with the bag valve mask needed through the sterilizing procedure.  
Darth Vader puts down his black mask on a sterilized sheet covering a rolling table-bot. It shivers mechanically under his heavy prosthetic hand, like a timid dog. It brings him cotton swabs and tiny spray cans bending its appendages of many parts. The process is meticulously choreographed in advance. Darth Vader can't speak wearing the manual resuscitator. The assistant pumps the bag with downcast eyes, not dearing to watch Dart Vaders face, where protruding eyes with no eyelids stares from a mass of stunted muscular attachments and remnants of burnt bones.

It went ill with the assistants predecessor. Darth Vader felt he pumped too irregularly. Darth Vader thinks all assistants pumps poorly, but today he controls himself. It is worse to train a new assistant, than to endure this particular idiotic assistant.  
Nobody understands why Darth Vader surrounds himself with humans, when it seems he hates them. Twi'lek's got much finer motor skills and are much better caregivers to handicapped beings. So why have human assistants? Maybe Darth Vader likes to get irritated by human clumsiness? Or – maybe he just likes to kill his assistants.

In the time between the removal if the bag valve and the attachment of the mask, Darth Vader survives solely on the Force. Therefore, he can feel the disturbance clearly. Everything Jedi do, spreads like waves in water through the Force. Darth Vader knows the Jedi making these waves. For years there have only been ripples in the Force. The storm troopers have looked everywhere, search for the one making ripples. And when they find him, they must bring him alive because … because ...

Darth Vader knows this Jedi better than any other Jedi. Better than any other person. When he was a man himself, he knew this man. Now he is larger than any man. His voice is deeper and amplified by the mask. He'd like to… meet this disturbing Jedi just once more. And kill him with his own hands. Then, the pain will stop. Not the constant discomfort from the prosthesis, attached directly to the shafts of the bone, not that pain.  
The mask sucks itself on and starts its rhythmical wheezing. The Robo-table hands him the ratchet. Darth Vader retighten.  
The human assistant bows and hurries out, relieved to be alive.

Dart Vader rises up. He towers above all; he is colossal, intimidating. He rules them all. He is the Master, not a padawan. Nobody can tell him what to do. He can do everything. He can destroy a planet with billions of people, and among them people, who could have been trained as a Jedi.  
He is feared, awed, but it will not soothe the pain, the insecurity. He explores the Force with his feelings. The Dark Side has no ends. Only the waves from the Light Side feels distant and distorted. Now, it feels like there are two Jedi. Or three? That's how the Dark Side of the Force tricks him. Sometimes he must suppress the feeling that the Emperor fooled him, though he gave him the Galaxy.

When Darth Vader dreams, he hears the loving laughter of Master and he gets his hair tousled and he is forgiven his antics and pranks. But it is not the Emperor who corrects his hand position and footing in the training hall of the dreams. It is Master Obi Wan Kenobi. The one, who first taught him the noble dance of war, and then cut off his perfectly trained hands and feet, leaving him in flames and hatred.

Darth Vader represses those dreams. He will not waste more time feeling in the Force, like Master ... No! Like Obi Wan Kenobi told him. What he learned, when he was a Padawan, he will forget. Those years of his life must be blanked, all memories wiped out. Therefore, the Jedi must die. Then Darth Vader won't miss him anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> The hardest thing to translate was the word "menneske" - which means man, human, person, people. If I wrote "man" it was too gendered, - menneske is not a gendered word. - If I wrote human, it sounded too technical. Person and people could be of any species and wouldn't work out either. I choose too write first human, and then man, but both times I felt it was not completely right.  
> The tools at the robo-table were difficult too. But then, they are also difficult for me in Danish. I have a note form home with me, when I need to buy something in a DIY store ...  
> \---  
> In SW VI we see, that Anakin has a wrinkled albino face, but I needed a medical reason to cover his face completely.


End file.
